FishingWorldTripwithEpic

Early November 2011 - Trip with Fishing World and more kingi action

You sorta hope the weather gods look out for you when you've got the journos in town but that couldn't be further from the truth when Sami Omani from Fishing World magazine turned up, we had some nice sunny skies but the wind was piping and we had a 2-3m south east swell running.

After sitting round on the first morning Sami and I decided to go and have a play ourselves and it was purely a lure only day, no livies in the tank today. Time to stretch the arms, I don't normally get to have a fish.

First drop and the JM rocket got nailed, aaaaaahhhh, this hurts.......was nice to be on a fish peeling line and a 17kg king was the result

Not too much else going on at our first spot so it was off to the Par Five and hello....this is a bit more solid, rod pointed down, thumb on the reel at sunset and I was still getting peeled....awe - wicked! Then the hard graft of getting the fish back up - and guys do this for fun?

Good times - 27-28kg kingi at an estimate, probably pushing the 30k mark, anyway he went back in the drink, don't get to fight fish like that myself often so that is my PB, stoked

On the other side of the boat Sami nails a nice 15kg fish on the 6500

We headed down south to the G Spot outside the Aldies and it was all on, every drift we were hitting 12-15kg fish - great fun on the jigs

Sami loaded up again, we carried on right til dark and there were plenty of bent rods and the odd dusting, capping off a day I'll remember for a while myself, cheers Sami!

Next day we snuck over a pretty gnarly bar and it was pretty obvious it was going to be too snotty out wide for the crew so within a few miles of home we hunted down some snapper. The lee of Manaia reef (which was pumping with a 2-3m swell) had a heap of white water, surge and nurtients flowing from it so that seemed a likely place and once a driftline was sorted the softbaits got hammered, Brent with a nice one on the small nuclear device

Double of nice healthy snaps

Sami had some serious string pulled off by this bruiser

Even the pannies were fired up and smashing swimmers

And a nice little 80cm king smashed the swimmer too putting up a nice fight on the softie gear and destined for the smoker, by this stage the boys had about 15fish in the bin and a day stuck in the lee of Slipper had turned into a pearler

Next day and Sami and I tackled the bar early and were out chasing kings by ourselves again. First drop and we were into a cice double of fish to start the ball rolling

A nice bite on jigs first thing

Oh yeah.....

Then the livies came into there own, the De Coro circle hooks doing their thing

No shortage of bait

Auw, quite like this new rod hey Sami

Arms are a bit tired now I might go back to driving the boat

Day Three on the kings and there was a big patch of fish in residence, all around the 15kg mark, we had Bill with us from the US and he nailed plenty of hard scrapping yellowtails

Sami was on the board first on the livies

And again

This one railed Bill

Yeah mate, the hits kept on coming with plenty more nice sized kings like this

Bill railed again on the JM300

Blue Broken Arrow this time doing the trick

Next up Bill, Andrew and the two Steve's were amongst the action for a weekend trip from Oz, and the first morning saw a hot bite with 30 fish landed by midday